Princeton Looks to Break Up the White Male Money Monopoly

Andrew Golden, president of the Princeton University Investment Co. Photographer: Heather Sten

It has been said that Princeton seeks to break the monopoly of white male money. Thus, the $ 25.9 billion endowments of the university moves (slowly) to hire women and minority managers.

There is no doubt that getting a second look from Princeton would make any investor celebrate. US university grants manage more than $ 600 billion, roughly equal to Taiwan’s gross domestic product. The largest funds have a time horizon of centuries. Its leaders can afford to wait for the legendary reward of new companies that turn into companies like Google and Facebook.

Thus, these vast investment funds remain almost exclusively the province of whites and men, which makes them an anomaly in the world of higher education. Meanwhile, women now earn almost 60 percent of US bachelor’s degrees. And non-white students, more than a third. The proportion of women in the faculties approaches half, if not in the highest positions.

Reduction in finance courses

It is necessary to highlight that the flow of under-represented women and minorities begins to be reduced in finance courses. It squeezes in business school. At the pinnacle of investment, everything is turned off. In fact, according to a study by the Knight Foundation published in January, companies that are owned by women and minorities manage only 1.3 percent of assets in the investment industry of $ 69 billion, although their performance is not statistically different from the industry in general.

For their part, men lead the 10 largest university endowments. None of the people who run them are black or Latino, although the heads of Harvard and the University of California are of Indian descent. Some universities are diversifying their staff. By August, nine of the 23 Princeton investment professionals will be women, including two Americans of Asian descent. There are two Latino men in the team.

As is well known, typically, endowments do not manage money on their own. Since they offer it to the best money managers they can find. Princeton has more than 70, including 44 in the U.S. Until 2018, women owned only one, the Bracebridge Capital hedge fund of Nancy Zimmerman, who also works for Yale. The administrators of black money did not have any, although one did it in the past.